Driving car dream job for a lazy soul

Once I had a job, a lazy soul’s dream, low stress too, I got paid to drive cars all day.

I remembered it when a Facebook memory popped up from eight years ago, a photo of the car I got to drive, a Toyota FJ Cruiser.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this vehicle but it’s kind of an oversized Jeep in bright colors, looks like some kind of big ol’ toy.

I drove it and discovered, eh, I didn’t like it so much.

I’m glad I didn’t spend “big coin” on one and find I didn’t like it..

It was big and clunky, it was more vehicle than I’d need and the windshield had three wipers.

I thought of the added cost of a third wiper, buying three wiper blades at a time.

I got to drive it as part of this “dream job”: Driving all kinds of vehicles between a Pensacola auto auction to and from car lots in the Florida panhandle and south Alabama.

For the longest time my favorite low-stress job was working as a desk clerk at Mountain Lake Hotel in Virginia, the place where, one day, they would film the famous movie, “Dirty Dancing.”

That job driving cars, though, how much low stress could one enjoy?

Show up at the auto auction about 8 a.m., hang around with the crew, probably about 30 men and women, drinking coffee, shootin’ the breeze until we got assignments, pile into vans and get hauled off to any number of car dealerships.

Then we’d drive cars back to the auto auction for the auction of the week where car sales people came to buy vehicles to sell..

Of course the job didn’t pay much, minimum wage. Most low-stress jobs don’t pay much anyway.

I’d hop in the car, say, in Mobile, Alabama and head back to Pensacola.

Every trip I’d fiddle with the radio seeing if I could find a station playing good music.

My favorite station I found on the road was one playing Cajun and Zydeco music out of Golden Meadow, Louisiana in the Mississippi Delta.

One time I was driving back from Fort Walton Beach, Fla. on a stormy day and I picked up an FM station playing oldies out of New Orleans, probably about 220 miles away.

I got to drive a Corvette one time.

All I could think of about the ‘Vette was it was tough for a guy as tall as me to get in the driver’s seat, it probably wouldn’t hold many bags of groceries after shopping at the superette and it wouldn’t be worth a hoot to drive on dirt roads in the southern piney woods or mountains.

I uncovered something about one kind of car: Buicks.

It seemed that no matter what shape or age any Buick sedan was I got to drive, the engine ran like a charm.

I had to run one back to Mobile once. The thing was beat up, turn signals didn’t work and the speedometer was broken.

I had to follow the traffic flow, guessing how fast I was going and use hand signals.

But that ol’ beater with a heater’s engine purred.

Then one day that media job I’d been fishing for came through.

I only took it because it paid more.

After a few weeks in that new gig I wished I could’ve gone back to driving cars.

Like I mentioned, it was a lazy soul’s low stress dream job.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

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